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Judge says PSN hack can't spark class action

They never promised you a rose garden

The notorious Sony PlayStation Network hack, which saw millions of accounts compromised in May 2011, doesn’t give grounds for a class action, according to a US judge.

The ruling, available from Courthouse News, dismisses most of the grounds for the lawsuit against Sony, which was first filed in June last year. The judge, Anthony Battaglia of the US District Court in Southern California, has given the plaintiffs until November 9 to decide whether they want to file an amended complaint.

However, as noted by Ars, the judgement seems to “gut” the main points of the complaint, based on the disclaimers present the customer terms and conditions that covered the PSN service.

Sony only promised to take “reasonable measures” to protect its customers, the judge noted, and explicitly stated that the company couldn’t promise that customers would be immune from intrusion, stating: “there is no such thing as perfect security ... we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information transmitted to us”.

Moreover, the judge said, the plaintiffs could only seek an action for economic loss if they could demonstrate that they’d been defrauded in some way by Sony Network Entertainment.

The judge also dismissed the plaintiffs’ complaints under various consumer protection laws. ®